A few weeks ago, for Easter, my church had a potluck. I didn’t know what to make but wanted to make something new. I eventually settled onto making sticky rice arancini because one, I never made sticky rice before and two, I want cronch. This recipe was taken from one of my favorite bloggers, Kristina Cho, from Eat Cho Food.

Chinese sticky rice is one of my favorite dim sum items–the rare occurrence where I like my rice to be mushy because of how chewy it is. I grew up knowing it by various different names or variations from zongzi (aka the Chinese tamale) to Lo mai fan. It’s basically sticky rice mixed with Chinese sausage, green onions, and shiitake mushrooms. It’s been something that I always wanted to try to make but thought it would take too much work with the whole lotus leaf tying business.

I may be Chinese but I’m not that Chinese.

However, it turns out that making this doesn’t have to be such an arduous ordeal after all. What I like about this recipe is that it offers a shortcut for the traditional way of making sticky rice. No leaf tying needed and even less ingredients than I expected as well! Something that also stood out about this recipe was the Italian spin put on it. The recipe author noticed some similarities between sticky rice and risotto and came up with the idea to combine the two dishes in the form of arancini.

What’s arancini?

Upon looking this up and having some helpful input from a housemate, arancini looks like this. They’re Italian risotto balls with their name derived from oranges or “aran”.

Kristina came up with the idea to do something similar by forming balls of sticky rice and giving it the katsu treatment with panko breadcrumbs for a crunch on the outside and a chewiness on the inside.

Noice,

How It’s Made

The first step was cooking the sticky rice and prepping all the other components for this sticky rice (the mushrooms, the sausage, and the green onions). Curiously, I didn’t need to use dried mushrooms and just stuck with fresh ones (they were also cheaper at the market too).

I then stirfried the sausages for a few minutes. This sausage is arguably the best part of this dish. Lap cheong is really addicting. Using the fat that was rendered from the sausage, I added the mushrooms and the white parts of green onions next along with some white pepper and salt and stir-fried until soft for another couple of minutes.

Then I dumped the sticky rice directly into the wok along with 5-6 tbsp of oyster sauce or enough to color the rice that sticky rice should look like. If you guys ever want a free arm workout, consider the exercise of stirring sticky rice as an option. Because sticky rice, you know, is sticky. The grains don’t separate like normal grains of rice when stirred. They will stick together. And thus require a bit more involved action to break down to until even distribution of oyster sauce, mushroom, and sausage bits.

After attacking the sticky rice thoroughly with a wooden spatula for a good couple of minutes, I was a bit dubious by how little seasoning was required (it only really required oyster sauce and white pepper) but when I tasted it, it tasted like what I expected sticky rice to taste like. It looked pretty great too.

Not wasting much time letting the sticky rice cool down, I wet my hands and began to form rice balls, scooping about 2 tbsp at a time. It was surprisingly really easy to roll these into balls. I was expecting this part to be an ordeal but it pleasantly was not. I placed each of these balls on a saran wrap lined plate. I made about 24 of these and placed these formed balls in the fridge to chill overnight and maintain their shape.

In the morning, I cracked two eggs into a bowl and filled a plate bowl of panko breadcrumbs then heated up a pot of canola oil to 370 degrees, putting my candy thermometer to good use. Doing the katsu treatment, I dipped each ball in egg and breadcrumbs before dropping them in to cook for about 1-2 minutes until each ball turned golden brown. I was a bit worried that the ball would immediately disintegrate when hitting the oil but luckily it did not.

They looked what I think they were supposed to look like in the end. Lovely golden brown balls with sticky rice inside. I placed them in a nice paper container and just added some green onion as a garnish to make it look nice. It looked pretty presentable for the potluck.

Overall

Taste-wise, it tasted solid in the way that sticky rice always tastes solid but it did taste the way that it was described–a deepfried, crunchy, sticky rice ball. I wish there was more taste to the deepfried breadcrumbs. Maybe I could’ve seasoned the breadcrumbs with something like togarashi or added a dipping sauce (which I realized I forgot to add) to the balls. If I were to make this again, I would either season the breadcrumbs or add a dipping sauce or just skip the deepfrying step and be satisfied with making sticky rice balls.

I also realize that to the outside, you can’t really tell that it’s sticky rice. I should’ve scattered some bits of sticky rice to clue people in what this dish was. This probably ended up tricking some people at the potluck who picked it up thinking it was something else.

Which did happen when a lead’s daughter picked it up, thinking it was a macaroni ball.

But she quickly realized that it was not a macaroni ball.

Sorry, Phoebe.